Losers ready to cry foul

The leaders are still flying around in their helicopters, making their last-minute appeals. But for almost a fifth of London’s electorate, polling day has already arrived. Most of the 500,000 Londoners who have obtained postal votes will already have sent them off. And, given the state of the Royal Mail, everyone else will need to post their papers today at the latest to make sure they arrive in time.

New Labour has created the astonishing Himalaya of postal votes we reveal today because it faces two related problems — a crisis of turnout, and a crisis of legitimacy.

At the last general election, only 59 per cent bothered to vote — a record
low in the history of the universal franchise — and only 41 per cent of those who did turn out voted Labour. In other words, less than one Briton in four positively backed Tony Blair. Yet that relatively feeble endorsement delivered the Prime Minister nearly two-thirds of the seats in the Commons, and the power to do exactly as he wished.

One reason why the Government appears to be electorally invincible, while also being fairly unpopular, is simply that Britain’s electoral system does not come anywhere near reflecting the actual wishes of the voters. It takes many fewer votes to elect a Labour MP than it does to elect any other kind. It’s not just that people have lost faith in Mr Blair — the great majority never voted for him in the first place.

The coming election threatens an even more serious crisis of legitimacy. On Thursday, if the polls are right, the Prime Minister will be re-elected by another landslide — on the lowest vote ever received by a winning party in post-war history.

If the turnout is the same as last time, Mr Blair’s tally, at somewhere between nine and 10 million votes, will actually be lower than Labour’s score in seven out of the eight post-war elections which the party lost. New Labour, that supposedly all-conquering force that has transformed the British political landscape, could end up winning a huge majority with only about a million more votes than Michael Foot managed in the ultimate disaster election of 1983.

Labour’s desperation to increase turnout and thus its vote tally is the reason why it has brought in a system allowing for postal votes on demand.

Unfortunately, this has ended up raising even nastier questions of illegitimacy. Last year’s local elections saw an explosion of postal voting on demand, but those demands for votes were sometimes made by the wrong kinds of people — notably Labour councillors in Birmingham and Blackburn who stole literally hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ballot papers.

The astonishing tallies of postal votes which we reveal today in some parts of London — for instance 32,000 in Barnet, more than a fifth of the entire electorate there — raise disturbing fears that something similar could be happening in the capital this week.

And the shenanigans in Bethnal Green and Bow which we also report on today — the ghost voters, the attempts to intimidate people into handing over their ballots, the alleged threats to withdraw funding from people who don’t vote a certain way — all these scams are so very much easier when coupled with postal voting. If your vote is cast at the polling station, it is much harder for anyone to steal it or to find out which party you gave it to. And if they can’t find out who you voted for, it makes it difficult for anyone to threaten you.

The vast majority of postal votes this week will, of course, be genuine. But if there are tight results it is entirely possible, even likely, that the losers will cry foul.

At least one or two London seats could end up being decided not on polling day, but, Florida-style, in court.

Partly because of postal voting, turnout on Thursday will almost certainly rise a few points from its 2001 low. But partly also because of postal voting, that will not quell the legitimacy issue that will dog the Labour third term.